From the tributes paid to Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense you'd expect retired Marine Corps General "Mad Dog" Mattis to be some kind of 'warrior poet'. Dig a little deeper. His quips about warfare are neither amusing nor benign.The "most revered Marine in a generation" advised his troops that fighting is "a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up there with you. I like brawling."The commander who "left soldiers to die" in Afghanistan faces a requirement of consent from both houses of Congress to waive the seven year waiting period between retirement of military officers and employment in a civilian role. Serious resistance to Mattis' appointment is not expected, despite objection from Representative Adam Smith and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, members of the respective Armed Services Committees. "Civilian control of our military is a fundamental principle of American democracy, and I will not vote for an exception to this rule," said Gillibrand.The president-elect's move to pack his administration with military brass presages an increased militarization of American policy. Trump is expected to pick retired General John Kelly for Secretary of Homeland Security. Kelly served three years as head of U.S. Southern Command during the Obama administration's failed attempt to close Guantanamo. Kelly is a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. He takes a tough stance on border security, warning Congress of smuggling rings in Mexico that spirit "tens of thousands of people to our nation's doorstep."Retired Army Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn has been tagged by the president-elect for the position of National Security Adviser. The former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency was retired early at age 56, his 'gung-ho' style deemed too 'disruptive' for an (Obama) administration determined to sweep the history of Iraq and Afghanistan under the rug.Trump is also considering ousted General David H. Petraeus, for Secretary of State. The former CIA director stepped down on November 9, 2012 after pleading guilty to mishandling classified information; he had given his biographer, who was also his mistress, sensitive material.You can't make this stuff up, and you shouldn't go along with it.Fascism is the Price We Pay for U.S. Hegemony It is not just a Trump presidency that needs defeating, notes Professor of Theology and Culture Mark Lewis Taylor, but more fundamentally the system of state repression erected by Democrats and Republicans alike to serve the interests of America's ruling class. "This is our hour of protest," urges revolutionary journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. "We have to physically resist. We will reclaim our power when we say no, when we refuse to cooperate. We must, in everything we do, defy the architects of imperialism, neoliberalism and mass incarceration.""Privileged citizens and residents need to bare their rage at the structures of abuse. . . "Those most vulnerable to a Trump regime are not powerless. They are not primarily -- surely not only -- victims. They are also resisters with powers for throwing off oppression, building movements for justice and to redress wrongs and imagine new political life. All the while they can also extend at times astonishing acts of love and human dignity." NO "Smooth Transition" to Fascism: Resist Attempts to "Normalize" the Criminal Aspirations of President-Elect Donald TrumpThe people who brought you warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention, and drone strikes now urge you to 'get along', in the interest of an 'efficient' and 'peaceful' changing of the guard, with appointees to a fresh reign of terror. Obama proclaimed the day after projected electoral college results (yet to be certified) that "We are now all rooting for his [Donald Trump's] success," with a plea to "respect our institutions." "We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead," Clinton said of the victor. World Can't Wait says NO! Not In Our Name. "Trump's policies and behavior are not normal and should not be treated as such," says Media Matters researcher Bobby Lewis. "Trump's cabinet is filling up with people who espouse horrific beliefs. His appointees so far includes a national security adviser [with assistance from Fox News' K.T. McFarland] who shares fake news and tells people 'fear of Muslims is rational', a chief strategist who is described as a 'white nationalist' by opponents and supporters alike, and an attorney general who was once denied a federal judgeship for being too racist . . . Other potential appointees include a bigoted press secretary who hates the press, a commerce secretary who wants to know 'what's with all the hoods in the hizzy', and a homeland security secretary who calls civil rights activists 'primitive', 'unmanageable misfits'.Nothing is more important right now than having a united movement that stops Trump from cohering a hold on the reins of governmental power. Resist Trump and a fascist America.

No Capitulation to Fascists

As speculation swirls around how bad a Trump regime will prove -- which promises he'll keep and which he will abandon -- magical thinking delays a proper response to the very real deployment of fascist rule in America. "That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn or be forced to accept," reads the original World Can't Wait call to action.

A recent statement published in Revolution newspaper warns "you [we] cannot try to 'wait things out' with fascists. Those who lived through Hitler's Germany and sat on the sidelines, looking on as Hitler rounded up one group after another, became shameful collaborators with monstrous crimes against humanity. Trump and his regime must be resisted and defied, beginning now, in many different ways and in every corner of society."

The president-elect campaigned to bring back torture; on waterboarding, he said, "I like it a lot. I don't think it's tough enough." Trump's selection of Jeff Sessions for Attorney General suggests he's moving forward with delivery on that promise, sooner than later.

Reject Trump's Cabinet of Horrors.

Of all the taboos a civilized society takes for granted, Salon writer Heather Digby Parton finds normalization of torture the most destructive. The candidates Trump has floated for national security and foreign policy jobs are universally open to some form of torture:

"Rudy Giuliani is enthusiastic about it, as is former U.N. ambassador John Bolton. Former congressman Pete Hoekstra, who is being considered as CIA director [Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo has subsequently claimed that 'honor'], has said he thinks Congress and the administration could work it out. Trump's newly named national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, has been noncommittal about his personal beliefs but said he thinks the president should be able to threaten torture and war crimes as a negotiating stance. . .

"We've been watching this slow-motion train wreck for a while. It just finally went off the rails."

People living in Germany accepted Hitler at a horrific cost to humanity. Today, with nuclear weapons, that cost could be far higher, concludes authors of the Revolution statement. Join and spread protests happening nationwide, now, on a near-daily basis.

From https://theintercept.com/2016/12/06/breakfast-of-torturers-a-former-cia-psychologist-promotes-his-memoir/

neoconservative think tank. Mitchell’s book dismisses the widely held criticism that torture does not work, describing in detail his role in interrogations, which included slamming prisoners into walls, known as walling, and waterboarding them.

President Barack Obama banned those methods in 2009, and Congress followed suit in 2015 by passing a law limiting interrogation techniques to those listed in the Army field manual.

Mitchell argued that the U.S. should not necessarily shy away from controversial techniques. “Somewhere between waterboarding and worse, and what’s in the army field manual, I think there needs to be some form of legal – let me emphasize that – legal coercion, to move them along so that you can start using social influence to get them talking again.”

Mitchell blamed “political correctness” for condemnation of such techniques, and urged Trump to adopt harsher methods.

“I would ask president-elect Trump this: What are you going to do when you have credible evidence of another pending, catastrophic attack… that could potentially involve nuclear weapons, and the person you’re interrogating or questioning isn’t responding to the Army Field Manuel?”

“At some point,” he continued, “if this obsessive political correctness continues, we’re going to be standing on the moral high ground, looking down into a smoking hole, that used to be several blocks in Los Angles.”

Mitchell and Jessen are currently facing a civil suit from two former torture victims, and the estate of Gul Rahman – who was tortured to death in a the CIA prison called the “Salt Pit.” The American Civil Liberties Union attorneys assisting with the case say that the executive summary of the Senate Torture Report, which was released in 2014, provides more than enough evidence to establish the role of the two men in the CIA torture program.

According to Senate investigators, Mitchell and Jessen signed an indemnification contract with the CIA in 2007, in which the CIA agreed pay legal damages for the two men going forward. At the time the Senate report was released, the agency had already paid out $1 million.

Despite the prospect of the civil suit, Mitchell talked openly about waterboarding and walling detainees. Mitchell asserted his methods were not illegal, because they were authorized by lawyers who subjected themselves to the same methods.

Mitchell claimed that he “personally waterboarded an assistant attorney general,” who authorized the technique just a few days later. “The time to tell me that it wasn’t torture was when that attorney general got off of the waterboard,” said Mitchell.

Acting assistant attorney General Daniel Levin requested in 2004 that he experience waterboarding firsthand before he opined on its legality, ABC News reported three years later. He was later forced out of the Department of Justice while authoring a memo that would have imposed tighter controls on torture techniques.

Mitchell, for his part, joked that he wouldn’t mind waterboarding more lawyers. “I waterboarded almost as many lawyers as I did terrorists,” he said. “I’m one down.”

The line was met with laughter.

In his book Pay Any Price, New York Times Journalist James Risen documents how the American Psychological Association quietly revised its ethics rules in 2002 to allow certified psychologists to work with the torture program. Emails obtained by the Intercept in April 2015 show that the CIA and APA had a close relationship, even cohosting a conference in 2003 titled “The Science of Deception.”

Mitchell called the accusations of collusion between the APA and the CIA “poppycock,” and “crap.” Speaking about the APA, who has since condemned Mitchell’s action, Mitchell said “those people are not part of my life. I don’t care what they think.”

Sarah Dougherty, a senior fellow with Physicians for Human Rights, argued that it was inexcusable for Mitchell to go on a public relations tour.

“Mitchell admits he ‘uses psychology as a weapon against those sent to destroy us to get intelligence,’” said Dougherty. “What he conveniently omits is that weaponizing psychology to undermine and harm people is a profoundly unethical application of those skills.”

“Health professionals have ethics for a reason,” she said. “He knowingly violated them.”

]]>Recent NewsFri, 09 Dec 2016 20:42:54 +000012-8-16 After 8 Years of Expanding Presidential War Powers, Obama Insists They Are Limitedhttp://warcriminalswatch.org/index.php/news/40-recent-news/2499-12-8-16-after-8-years-of-expanding-presidential-war-powers-obama-insists-they-are-limited
By Alex Emmons

From https://theintercept.com/2016/12/06/after-8-years-of-expanding-them-obama-insists-that-presidential-war-powers-are-limited/

Anticipating that Donald Trump might try to fulfill his promises to “bomb the shit” out of terror groups and do a “hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” President Obama released a report on Monday summarizing his administration’s views of the legal barriers and policies limiting the president’s military power.

The 61-page report calls for trying terrorism suspects in civilian court and explains at length why no future president could legally torture detainees. It lays out the administration’s self-imposed limits on military operations — and declares that a 2001 resolution Congress passed in the wake of 9/11 is not a blank check to go to kill alleged terrorists wherever they are.

“It clearly reads like an explanation, a textbook that’s left for the next person,” said Naureen Shah, director of the Security With Human Rights Program at Amnesty International. “Here are all the things you cannot do.”

But in trying to defend Obama’s legacy, the report paints a picture of an administration far more restrained than it was in practice.

The report comes just weeks before Trump will inherit bombing campaigns in seven countries, a legally unaccountable drone program, and an open prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The new report is the latest in a series of public steps Obama has recently taken to give the appearance of reining his war powers. Over the summer, for instance, the White House released its internal guidelines for drone strikes outside of war zones and issued a new executive order calling for more transparency on casualties going forward.

But both documents could be revoked by a stroke of the next president’s pen – a fact that CIA Director John Brennan admitted at an event in July.

Obama dramatically escalated the use of drones to kill alleged terrorists far away from recognized warzones. In an October interview with New York Magazine, Obama noted that his executive reforms to the drone program were motivated by concern he would hand off a killing program with no oversight or controls. “You end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate,” said Obama.

But more quietly, Obama has continued to expand the power of the president to wage covert war. The Washington Post reported last month that Obama was elevating Joint Special Operations Command – the government’s high-level team for global killing missions – into a “ new multiagency intelligence and action force,” with expanded power to launch attacks on terrorist groups around the world.

As for its discussion of the drone program, Monday’s report repackages many of the Obama administration’s favorite propaganda lines for the next president: The report refers to assassinations with the hazy phrase “targeted lethal force”; It adamantly maintains that the U.S. has a preference for capturing terrorists over killing them, while it has routinely demonstrated the opposite; and the report celebrates the clandestine killing program for its “transparency,” despite the fact that the president did not publicly discuss the program until 2013. In addition, most of the documents made public from the program were released due to leaks, Congressional pressure, and lawsuits.

The report also adopts the administration’s practice of whitewashing civilian death tolls, arguing that the administration’s record on civilian casualties exceeds “the safeguards that apply as a matter of law in the course of an armed conflict.” Earlier in the summer, the administration released a ludicrously conservative estimate of the number of civilians killed by U.S. drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The administration claimed that they had killed between 64 and 116 civilians, while independent estimates say the number could be as high as nine times that.

In outlining standards “for the use of lethal force,” the report advocates a “near certainty” standard that the target is present, and that innocent people not be injured or killed. In doing so, the Obama administration is advocating a policy that they have appeared to repeatedly violate – including when U.S. drones struck a Yemeni wedding party in December 2013, and in January 2015, when the CIA killed two aid workers held hostage in Pakistan.

The report outlines additional legal safeguards the Obama administration claims it applied before it killed American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki – the only American citizen who it says was hit by a “specific, targeted strike.” The report does not mention the other seven U.S. citizens who were killed by drones.

The report boasts that American citizens have due process rights under the Fourth and Fifth Amendment no matter where they are, and cautions the Trump administration to take Constitutional rights into consideration when “assessing whether it is lawful to target the individual.”

But the Obama administration has consistently fought to undermine those Constitutional protections. For instance, it has argued that citizens cannot go to court to challenge their place on a government kill list, and courts have no role to play in oversight after a strike has taken place.

A large portion of the report is devoted to justifying how far the war on terror has expanded, and how a 2001 resolution passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks could be stretched to cover wars 15 years later in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, along with drone bombings and other operations in Yemen and Somalia. The report does not mention Pakistan, where the U.S. has also waged a secret drone war since 2004.

Presidents Bush and Obama have cited the resolution to justify military action from Libya to the Philippines, and critics have argued that it provides a president with blank check authority to go after insurgent groups with loose affiliations to the September 11 attacks.

But the report argues that the resolution is not an authorization to wage unlimited war against insurgent groups. The report says that in order to be considered an “associated force” of al Qaeda, an insurgent group must not only be “an organized, armed group that has entered the fight alongside al-Qa’ida or the Taliban,” it must also be “a co-belligerent… in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

But the recent move to designate the Somali insurgent group al-Shabaab as an “associated force” of al Qaeda illustrates how slippery the standard is.

The report offers the administration’s first on-the-record explanation of why it added al-Shabaab to its list, despite the fact that Al-Shabaab has never demonstrated a capability to attack the U.S. homeland. According to the report, they were nonetheless designated because they “pledged loyalty to al Qaeda,” and have conducted attacks against “U.S. persons and interests in East Africa.”

But the fact that the administration’s decision was unilateral and unaccountable – and made without any public demonstration of the evidence to support it – serves as a tutorial for future abuse.

Taking a firmer note, the report argues forcefully that torture is illegal and cites U.S. laws, treaties, executive orders, and regulations that make it so.

But it does not offer an explanation for why the Obama administration failed to prosecute CIA torture in the Bush administration – a failure that rights groups frequently blame for the continued public support for torture.

Human rights advocates praised the report for its opposition to torture and lawlessness in war, but argued that its framework would allow some violations to slip through the cracks.

“Another way to put it is that it is trying to make sure the floodgates are closed while leaving some doors unlocked,” said Shah. “And that’s what’s frightening.”

The White House issued a companion memo instructing the next administration to build on the framework of the report, and revise and reissue it for future years. But that memo, like many of the order and directives in the report, could simply be discarded on a whim by the Trump administration.

From http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/12/07/groups-demand-arrest-war-mastermind-kissinger-nobel-peace-prize-forum

The Nobel Peace Prize committee last month stunned many observers by choosing Henry Kissinger—the former secretary of state behind the secret American bombing of Cambodia and who supported Argentina's "dirty wars," among other things—to speak at a forum on "The United States and World Peace after the Presidential Election."

"The Nobel Committee has arranged for well-known war mastermind Henry Kissinger to speak as an honored guest at a forum that is part of the Nobel Peace Prize events," the petition states. "Several of Kissinger's crimes come under treaties that make it mandatory for Norway to prosecute. Kissinger is complicit or a main actor in many violations of the Genocide Convention and of the Geneva Conventions."

Nobel Peace Prize Watch lays out Kissinger's actions (pdf) in great detail, making the case that Norway is obligated under international law to arrest the former secretary of state.

Kissinger was infamously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his role in the Vietnam war—a decision that comedian Tom Lehrer said "made political satire obsolete."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor under Jimmy Carter, is also scheduled to speak at the Oslo forum, which will take place on December 11. Jan Oberg of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research condemned the Nobel committee's decision to honor the two former U.S. officials:

These two experts on warfare and interventionism will—Orwellian style—speak about "The United States and World Peace after the Presidential Election."

This is the country that, since 1980, has intervened violently in Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosova/Serbia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, i.e. 14 Muslim countries. It has some 630 base facilities in 130+ countries. It has its U.S. Special Forces (SOF) in 133 countries.

It has used nuclear weapons without apology and owns the second largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

The U.S. stands for about 40 percent of the world's military expenditures, is the world's leading arms exporter and has killed more people than anybody else since 1945. It's the master of (imprecise) drone strikes. It presently supports Saudi Arabia's bestial war on Yemen and conducts a military build-up in Asia and the Pacific planning, as it seems, for what looks like a future confrontation with China. And not with terribly positive results in its Middle East policies since 1945.

So with all these credentials, please tell us about world peace!

And Nobel Peace Prize Watch further argues: "Millions of people, victims and survivors, will question or be seriously offended if Norway goes through with praise and honors to a person in the top ranks of the history of callous international state criminality. The suffering ordered or managed by Kissinger has led to increasing insecurity and violence for which all citizens of the world pay a high price."

Nearly 15 years after the United States adopted a program to interrogate terrorism suspects using techniques now widely considered to be torture, no one involved in helping craft it has been held legally accountable.

Even as President Obama acknowledged that the United States “tortured some folks,” his administration declined to prosecute any government officials. But now, one lawsuit has gone further than any other in American courts to fix blame. The suit, filed in October 2015 in Federal District Court in Spokane, Wash., by two former detainees in C.I.A. secret prisons and the representative of a third who died in custody, centers on two contractors, psychologists who were hired by the agency to help devise and run the program.

One of them, James E. Mitchell, has written a book to be released Tuesday about his involvement in the program. In the book, he argues that he acted with government permission and that he and Bruce Jessen, the other psychologist and his co-defendant in the lawsuit, received medals from the C.I.A.Legal experts say the incoming administration of Donald J. Trump could force the case’s dismissal on national security grounds. Deciding whether to invoke the so-called state secrets privilege over evidence requested in the lawsuit could represent the new president’s first chance to weigh in on the issue of torture. Mr. Trump has endorsed the effectiveness of torture and said he would bring back waterboarding, though it is not clear now that he intends to do so.

Lawyers for Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have clashed with the Justice Department over what classified evidence is needed to defend against the suit’s allegations that the men “designed, implemented, and personally administered an experimental torture program.” Last month, despite United States government opposition, the court approved the defendants’ request for oral depositions of John Rizzo, a former C.I.A. acting general counsel, and José Rodriguez, the former chief of the agency’s clandestine spy service who also headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

Dr. Mitchell was first publicly identified as one of the architects of the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation” program nearly a decade ago, and has given some news media interviews, but is now providing a more detailed account of his involvement. His book, “Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America” (Crown Forum), was written with Bill Harlow, a former C.I.A. spokesman. It was reviewed by the agency before release. (The New York Times obtained a copy of the book before its publication date.)In the book, Dr. Mitchell alleges that harsh interrogation techniques he devised and carried out, based on those he used as an Air Force trainer in survival schools to prepare airmen if they became prisoners of war, protected the detainees from even worse abuse by the C.I.A.Dr. Mitchell wrote that he and Dr. Jessen sequestered prisoners in closed boxes, forced them to hold painful positions for hours and prevented them from sleeping for days. He also takes credit for suggesting and implementing waterboarding — covering a detainee’s face with a cloth and pouring water over it to simulate the sensation of drowning — among other now-banned techniques. “Although they were unpleasant, their use protected detainees from being subjected to unproven and perhaps harsher techniques made up on the fly that could have been much worse,” he wrote. C.I.A. officers, he added, “had already decided to get rough.”Mr. Obama declined to open a broad inquiry into the treatment of terrorism suspects, saying as president-elect that the nation needed to “look forward.” He did not rule out prosecuting those who went beyond techniques authorized by the Justice Department, but no one has been charged with those offenses under his watch. During the George W. Bush administration, a C.I.A. contractor was convicted in the death of an Afghan detainee at an American military base in Afghanistan.Henry F. Schuelke, a Washington lawyer with the firm Blank Rome, who represents Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said that he believed his clients “were left holding the bag” while C.I.A. officials involved in the program have been protected from the lawsuit. “The government and its officers, namely many of the C.I.A. officers, enjoy sovereign immunity,” Mr. Schuelke said in an interview.

Gul Rahman, an Afghan captured in November 2002, was found dead in a secret C.I.A. prison. A representative of his estate is a party to the lawsuit against the two C.I.A. contractors. Credit Habib Rahman, vis Associated Press

Mr. Schuelke and colleagues have argued in court that the senior United States District Court judge, Justin L. Quackenbush, should dismiss the case because, among other reasons, “sovereign immunity” extended to their clients, who were acting on the government’s behalf. But the judge denied the motion and the case has proceeded under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreigners to sue in United States court for violations of their human rights.If the former detainees are successful, it would be the first time a United States civilian court has held individuals accountable for their role in developing counterterrorism policies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “All of the other cases have been thrown out on procedural grounds,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at Seton Hall Law School. “If this is successful, it could pave the way for other torture victims to seek redress.” Still, some lawyers say it could be difficult for the plaintiffs to prevail.The case has proceeded in large part because the psychologists’ role in the program has already been documented, particularly in the declassified executive summary of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the interrogation program released in 2014. While the Justice Department has fought to restrict the scope of sensitive information that it has been asked to produce in the case, it has thus far not asserted the state secrets privilege, a broad power to protect national security that could effectively shut down the suit. That could change, analysts say, under the Justice Department in the Trump administration. Representatives for Mr. Trump did not reply to requests for comment on the case, scheduled for trial in June 2017.Lawyers for the detainees said they had no need for classified information. “There are dramatically more details in the public record about what the C.I.A. and the psychologists did,” said Steven Watt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “Now, any attempt to argue that torture is a state secret would be a transparent attempt to evade accountability.”But lawyers for the psychologists contend they require access to secret information to prepare an adequate defense. In his book, Dr. Mitchell, who had been identified years before the Senate Intelligence Committee report and had formed a company that received $81 million for counterterrorism after Sept. 11 (his personal percentage of profit from the contract “was in the small single digits,” he wrote), nonetheless criticizes Senate staff for allegedly leaking his name, which he said made him a target of terrorist threats. He also says that the techniques he used sometimes caused resistant detainees to cooperate in providing useful intelligence, though the book offers little, if any, new evidence that this is the case.Dr. Mitchell says Democratic Senate staff “cherry-picked documents to create a misleading narrative” from tens of thousands of pages of the C.I.A.’s own documentation that the committee reviewed over several years while compiling its report. The report concluded that the C.I.A.’s use of harsh interrogation techniques was brutal, costly, ineffective at gathering intelligence and “damaged the United States’ standing in the world.” The C.I.A. did not provide comment on Dr. Mitchell’s book by the time of this article’s publication.

In one instance, Dr. Mitchell describes his and Dr. Jessen’s experiences with Gul Rahman, an Afghan citizen captured in November 2002 in Peshawar. He was found dead, naked from the waist down on a bare concrete floor in the freezing cold at a secret C.I.A. prison that month, shackled and short-chained to a wall. A representative of Mr. Rahman’s estate is a party to the lawsuit against the two psychologists.Dr. Mitchell writes that he and Dr. Jessen raised concerns about Mr. Rahman’s well-being before their departure from the site, just days before his death. “To imply that his death was part of the program I was involved with is simply false,” Dr. Mitchell writes.But a January 2003 C.I.A. memorandum outlining an investigation into Mr. Rahman’s death, released to the A.C.L.U. in late September, found that Dr. Jessen interrogated Mr. Rahman after he was subjected to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower, and rough treatment.” (The document had previously been released, but in a more redacted form without the psychologists’ names.) During that interrogation, Mr. Rahman resisted answering questions and “complained about the violation of his human rights.”Dr. Jessen also said he “thought it was worth trying” a so-called rough takedown, during which Mr. Rahman was forced out of his cell, secured with Mylar tape after his clothes were cut off, covered with a hood, slapped, punched and then dragged along a dirt floor, the memo said. Mr. Rahman died of what an autopsy suggested was hypothermia.The other two plaintiffs, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a Tanzanian, and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, a Libyan, continue to suffer from psychological problems related to their torture, The New York Times has reported.The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory and punitive damages. “This case shows that there are consequences for torturing people,” Mr. Watt of the A.C.L.U. said, adding that it “should serve as a warning to anyone thinking about bringing back torture.”

U.S. Special Operations forces travel through the village of Fatisah in the northern Syrian province of Raqqa on May 25, 2016. (Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images)

The Obama administration is giving the elite Joint Special Operations Command — the organization that helped kill Osama bin Laden in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs — expanded power to track, plan and potentially launch attacks on terrorist cells around the globe, a move driven by concerns of a dispersed terrorist threat as Islamic State militants are driven from strongholds in Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials said.

The missions could occur well beyond the battlefields of places like Iraq, Syria and Libya where Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has carried out clandestine operations in the past. When finalized, it will elevate JSOC from being a highly-valued strike tool used by regional military commands to leading a new multiagency intelligence and action force. Known as the “Counter-External Operations Task Force,” the group will be designed to take JSOC’s targeting model — honed over the last 15 years of conflict — and export it globally to go after terrorist networks plotting attacks against the West.

The creation of a new JSOC entity this late in the Obama’s tenure is the “codification” of best practices in targeting terrorists outside of conventional conflict zones, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss administration deliberations. It is unclear, however, if the administration of President-elect Donald Trump will keep this and other structures set up by Obama. They include guidelines for counterterrorism operations such as approval by several agencies before a drone strike and “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed. This series of presidential orders is known as the “playbook.”

The new JSOC task force could also offer intelligence, strike recommendations and advice to the militaries and security forces of traditional Western allies, or conduct joint operations, officials said. In other parts of the world, with weak or no governments, JSOC could act unilaterally.

The global focus is reminiscent of when U.S. forces first went after al-Qaeda in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. As approaching U.S. troops forced militants to flee their safe havens in Afghanistan and scatter across the globe, the United States followed in pursuit, using CIA assets to grab suspected al-Qaeda operatives in dozens of countries, sometimes capturing and imprisoning them under murky legal authorities and using interrogation techniques widely seen as torture.Some in the Pentagon hope to see the new task force working in tandem with the CIA, elevating a sometimes distant relationship to one of constant coordination to track and go after suspected terrorists outside of traditional war zones. In recent years the agency’s involvement in global paramilitary operations has waned — with fewer strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, and its armed drones in Syria transferred to the Pentagon. It’s still unclear how much the CIA may be willing to cooperate with JSOC and more broadly with the Pentagon following the White House’s decision.The agency, with its broad contacts overseas, espionage networks and long experience in covert operations still has much greater reach than JSOC. The CIA declined to comment. The new JSOC task force will report to the Pentagon through the U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, according to U.S. military officials, creating a hybrid command system that can sidestep regional commanders–with their coordination–for the sake of speed.In the past, units such as the Army’s Delta Force — which is part of SOCOM and its subordinate command JSOC — were usually deployed under those regional commanders, known as geographic combatant commands. The new task force, however, will alter that process by turning SOCOM’s chief, Army Gen. Raymond “Tony” Thomas, into a decision-maker when it comes to going after threats under the task force’s purview. While Thomas will help guide certain decisions, the operations will ultimately have to be approved by the White House and the Pentagon. The task force will essentially turn Thomas into the leading authority when it comes to sending Special Operations units after threats.“Now [Thomas] can request whatever he wants and … unless there’s some other higher competing priority, the combatant commanders have to cough it up,” said a former senior defense official.Turning SOCOM into a command with a global reach has been on the table for the last 15 years. In 2001, Air Force Gen. Charles Holland, then SOCOM’s commander, was hesitant to create a command structure that would effectively put SOCOM on the same level as the geographic combatant commanders. He believed it would cause too much friction with regional commanders. Instead, he decided that only in rare instances would SOCOM actually direct Special Operations forces.It remains to be seen if the new organization will generate tensions between Special Operations Command and the generals in charge of U.S. forces in places such as the Middle East or Europe. In his March congressional confirmation testimony, Thomas suggested that assigning more authorities to SOCOM would allow for “synchronized operations” against nonstate threats that span geographic boundaries. But regional commanders, all four star generals, guard their turf carefully. Officials hope the task force, known throughout the Pentagon as “Ex-Ops,” will be a clearinghouse for intelligence coordinating and targeting against groups or individuals attempting to plot attacks in places like the United States and Europe.According to officials familiar with plans for the task force, it will initially draw on an existing multinational intelligence operation in the Middle East that tracks foreign fighters, called Gallant Phoenix, and one of JSOC’s intelligence centers in Northern Virginia.While in the past the smaller task forces, such as Gallant Phoenix, were staffed by representatives from different intelligence agencies, the new task force aims to have decision-makers present, ensuring that the targeting process happens in one place and quickly.“Layers have been stripped away for the purposes of stopping external networks,” said a defense official. “There has never been an ex-ops command team that works trans-regionally to stop attacks.”The defense official said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies will support JSOC personnel as they synthesize information and offer recommendations on how to handle specific threats.Over the past decade JSOC has also built strong relations with police agencies in Germany, Britain, France and Turkey, as they have moved to combat the flow of foreign fighters returning to their home countries.The number of participating intelligence agencies, both internationally and U.S.-based within the task force is in flux, the official added, as intelligence-sharing laws and internal friction have kept some on the periphery of the organization.JSOC — rarely mentioned by name by U.S. officials due to the clandestine nature of its work — was cited specifically by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter last month in Paris after he and Thomas met with defense ministers involved in the fight against the Islamic State. The command “has been put in the lead” of countering the Islamic State’s external operations outside conflict zones, Carter said, surprising some defense officials in Washington.A senior administration official, asked to comment on the plan, issued a statement that did not use JSOC’s name, but acknowledged the role Special Operations forces play in tracking foreign fighters away from the battlefield.“These forces on the ground, operating in close concert with our partners, have gathered critical intelligence off the battlefield, and have shared that information with our coalition partners and allies,” the statement said. “This information is helping us ramp up actions against [Islamic State] leaders and operatives planning attacks, track foreign fighters returning to their home countries and improve law enforcement actions aimed at interdicting potential plotters.”

One of the many alarming facts that came to light with the release of the executive summary of the Senate Torture Report in 2014 was that the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons had sent a “delegation of several officers” to Afghanistan to conduct an assessment an infamous CIA detention site and concluded the CIA “did not mistreat the detainees.”

Senate investigators found that the bureau officers visited a detention site code-named Cobalt north of Kabul in November 2002. That site — also known as the Salt Pit — has become infamous for the brutal torture inflicted on detainees there, including rectal exams conducted with “excessive force.” According to Senate investigators, the CIA’s own employees described the facility as “a dungeon,” where detainees “cowered” as interrogators opened the door and “looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

In April, the ACLU filed suit to obtain documents related to the visit, which the Bureau of Prisons initially claimed did not exist.

The bureau has now turned over several emails mentioning the visit — along with a written declaration by a senior Bureau of Prisons lawyer explaining the attempted cover-up. That declaration states that the officers were tasked orally, so that there was no record of their travel, and that the CIA forbade the two officers from producing records of or about the visit.

In a newly released 2011 email, one of the officers tells a supervisor that “we were not even allowed to speak with a supervisor about what was going on.”

The declaration says that due to the lack of records, searches for documents based on keywords like “CIA, Afghanistan, and COBALT” initially turned up no documents. After the ACLU filed suit, the bureau conducted a more thorough search, identifying the individuals who traveled to Afghanistan and searching their communications.

The declaration confirms that two Bureau of Prisons officers traveled to “an international location” in November 2002 to provide “basic correctional practices training” to the CIA.

The Senate report said Bureau of Prison officers were conducting an “assessment” rather than a “training.” CIA documents quoted in the report said BOP personnel were “WOW’ed” by the prison, having “never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived” with “everyone in the dark.”

While BOP officers toured the facility, interrogators tortured detainee Gul Rahman to death. A CIA team dragged Rahman out of his cell, beat him, immersed him in cold water, and put him in an isolation cell, where he died of hypothermia overnight.

According to the Senate report, the Bureau of Prison officers remarked that “there is nothing like this in the Federal Bureau of Prisons” but nonetheless concluded that the prison was “sanitary” and “not inhumane.”

“The Bureau of Prisons’ work at the Salt Pit illustrates how torture — and the secrecy surrounding it — corrupts every institution it touches,” ACLU attorney Carl Takei wrote in a blog post. “This is more important than ever to remember when the man who will soon occupy the Oval Office has stated publicly that he ‘love[s] waterboarding’ and ‘would absolutely authorize something beyond waterboarding.’”

U.S. General David Petraeus, commander of the international security assistance force and commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, testifies at a Senate Armed Services committee hearing on the situation in Afghanistan, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. March 15, 2011. REUTERS/Jason Reed/File Photo

Retired U.S. general David Petraeus indicated on Wednesday that he would serve in President-elect Donald Trump's administration if he was offered a job, according to an interview on Britain's BBC radio.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Petraeus, who resigned as CIA chief in 2012 after an extra-marital affair was revealed, was under consideration for the post of defense secretary.

Asked if he would agree to serve in the Trump administration, Petraeus said: "I've been in a position before where a president has turned to me in the Oval Office in a difficult moment and .... said 'I'm asking you as your president and commander-in-chief to take command of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan'.

"The only response can be 'yes, Mr President'."

Petraeus was a four-star general in the U.S. Army and oversaw international forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was later appointed as CIA director by President Barack Obama.

Asked during his BBC interview if he thought Trump had the right temperament to be president, Petraeus said: "We're going to have to see.

"I'm not someone who's had contact with him in the past. I don't know how he operates. It's interesting that those who have been talking to him have said he's a very personable, very hospitable, very gracious guy, full of questions and dialogue.

"This is a guy who's done pretty well in life."

Pressed further on the pressures of the office of U.S. president and whether he had confidence that Trump was capable of doing the job, Petraeus said: "I think so, yes. It's up to Americans not only to hope that that is the case, but if they can, endeavor to help him."

]]>Recent NewsThu, 24 Nov 2016 02:21:14 +000011-15-16 Mike Pence Will Be the Most Powerful Christian Supremacist in U.S. Historyhttp://warcriminalswatch.org/index.php/news/40-recent-news/2484-11-15-16-mike-pence-will-be-the-most-powerful-christian-supremacist-in-us-history
By Jeremy Scahill

Donald Trump and Mike Pence sit together during an event at the Pastors Leadership Conference at New Spirit Revival Center on Sept. 21, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

The election of Donald Trump has sent shockwaves through the souls of compassionate, humane people across the country and the world. Horror that a candidate who ran on a platform of open bigotry, threats against immigrants and Muslims, and blatant misogyny will soon be president is now sinking in. Trump appointed a white nationalist, Steve Bannon, as chief White House strategist — which was promptly celebrated by the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Bannon and other possible extremist Trump appointees, such as John Bolton, a neocon who believes the U.S. should “bomb Iran,” and the authoritarian Rudy Giuliani, are now receiving much deserved public scrutiny.

The incoming vice president, Mike Pence, has not elicited the same reaction, instead often painted as the reasonable adult on the ticket, a “counterbalance” to Trump and a “bridge to the establishment.” However, there is every reason to regard him as, if anything, even more terrifying than the president-elect.

Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants — would not have been able to win the White House on their own. For them, Donald Trump was a godsend. “This may not be our preferred candidate, but that doesn’t mean it may not be God’s candidate to do something that we don’t see,” said David Barton, a prominent Christian-right activist and president of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to making the U.S. government enforce “biblical values.” In June, Barton prophesied: “We may look back in a few years and say, ‘Wow, [Trump] really did some things that none of us expected.’”

Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors. With Republican control of the House and Senate and the prospect of dramatically and decisively tilting the balance of the Supreme Court to the far right, the incoming administration will have a real shot at bringing the fire and brimstone of the second coming to Washington.

“The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government,” contends Jeff Sharlet, author of two books on the radical religious right, including “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” “So when they speak of business, they’re speaking not of something separate from God, but they’re speaking of what, in Mike Pence’s circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained.”

One of Trump’s sons, Don Jr., reportedly said that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy, while Trump would focus on the vague mission of “Making America Great Again.” Trump’s campaign subsequently claimed the story was “made up,” though Trump has consistently denied saying things he is on record as saying, so who knows? In any case, the implications of a Pence vice presidency are vast. Pence combines the most horrid aspects of Dick Cheney’s worldview with a belief that Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” novels are not fiction, but an omniscient crystal ball.

How the GOP foisted Pence on Trump is undoubtedly a fascinating story that hopefully will some day be revealed. Obviously, Pence gave Trump badly needed credibility with evangelical voters and the GOP establishment, but Pence’s selection portends a governing apocalypse. While Trump has flip-flopped on a variety of issues, from abortion to immigration to war and health care, Pence has been a reliable stalwart throughout his public life in the cause of Christian jihad — never wavering in his commitment to America-First militarism, the criminalizing of abortion, and utter hatred for gay people (unless they go into conversion therapy “to change their sexual behavior,” which Pence has suggested the government pay for).

He supported making the Patriot Act permanent and wants to ban the burning of the U.S. flag. Pence does not believe federal law enforcement agencies should have to get a FISA warrant to conduct domestic surveillance and voted against requiring any warrant for domestic wiretapping. As governor of Indiana, he did quietly sign a bill to limit the use of Stingray devices by local law enforcement, though it was during the early stages of the Snowden revelations and the public concern about government surveillance was intense.

Pence supported giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies implicated in warrantless surveillance. He does not want congressional oversight of CIA interrogations — which Trump believes should include waterboarding and other torture “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” Pence has paid lip service to the illegality of torture but said that “enhanced interrogation” has saved lives. He has characterized relationship-building, non-coercive interrogation strategies as “Oprah Winfrey methods.” Pence is against whistleblower protections that would prohibit retaliation for reporting crimes or misdeeds. In 2002, the ACLU gave him a 7 percent rating on civil rights.

He wants the U.S. to resume the practice of holding new prisoners at Guantánamo Bay or, as Trump put it, they plan “to fill it up.” Pence also supports expanded use of the military tribunal system.

Pence has claimed that he wants to “economically isolate” Iran rather than engage in a military attack. But should Israel decide to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, he said in 2010, “if the world knows nothing else, let the world know this: that America will stand with Israel.” He supported a failed legislative effort to make it U.S. policy “to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force.” Both in rhetoric and policy, Pence has compared “radical Islam” to the “evil empire of the Soviet Union” and said that he and Trump will “name the enemy” and “marshal the resources of our nation and our allies to hunt them down and destroy them before they threaten us.”

As has been widely reported, as governor of Indiana, Pence signed a law requiring fetal tissue from abortions to be buried or cremated, making his state one of the most medieval in its approach to reproductive rights. The fetus burial law, which Pence claimed would “ensure the dignified final treatment of the unborn,” was suspended at the 11th hour by a federal judge, who said it was likely unconstitutional. Pence has been at the forefront of the movement to defund Planned Parenthood. “We’ll see Roe v. Wade consigned to the ash heap of history where it belongs,” Pence promised. He has long sought to have 14th Amendment protections applied to fetuses, arguing that they should be declared persons. In Congress, Pence voted to criminally punish doctors who performed late-term abortions, except in cases where the woman’s life was in danger. A doctor who “kills a human fetus” faces up to two years in prison, according to that law.

Pence opposed efforts to widen hate crimes laws to include attacks on LGBT people. He tried to block federal funding of HIV treatments unless they came with a requirement to advocate against gay relationships. Pence opposes non-straight people serving in the military. “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service because the presence of homosexuals in the ranks weakens unit cohesion,” he said.

Pence believes “the only truly safe sex … is no sex” and once (falsely) claimed on CNN that “condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases.”

Pence supports the “wall” Trump has said he will build, believes in self-deportation, and has staked out one of the most virulent positions against the U.S. taking in refugees from Syria. In defending a proposed ban on Syrian refugees entering Indiana, Pence said it was necessary to “ensure the safety and security of all Hoosiers.” He has advocated for greater militarization of the so-called war on drugs, including escalated military patrols. Pence denounced activists and others protesting recent police killings of unarmed African-Americans, charging they “seize upon tragedy in the wake of police action shootings.” He said he found it offensive to “use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias or institutional racism and that really has got to stop.” He has said that “police officers are the best of us.”

Pence is a strong supporter of stop-and-frisk programs, which in New York were used overwhelmingly against people of color. “It’s on a sound constitutional footing,” said Pence, who added that he wanted the practice expanded nationwide. “Stop-and-frisk literally saved lives in New York City when it was implemented, and it’s been implemented in cities around the country.”

One interesting difference between Pence and Trump centers on the First Amendment. Trump has made clear he believes in waging war against a free press and has encouraged hostility toward journalists covering his campaign. While in Congress, Pence was a major force behind trying to get a federal shield law to protect journalists’ rights to maintain confidential sources. A former radio talk show host, Pence said he was inspired to act by the case of then-New York Times reporter Judy Miller, who was imprisoned for refusing to answer questions about her sources during the scandal over the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. No such law was ever passed and the bill provided wide latitude to nullify the protections of journalists in national security situations.

When he joined the ticket with Trump last summer, Pence claimed they were internally reviewing the campaign policy on the treatment of journalists covering Trump events. If anything, the situation worsened as the campaign moved forward.

On health care, Pence is now on board with repealing the Affordable Care Act, though as governor he did embrace the law in a pretty bold act of hypocrisy. He also supported denying non-emergency care for people who cannot afford a Medicare co-payment and opposed expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Pence is what might be termed “climate change curious,” though earlier in his political career, he wrote an essay in which he asserted, “Global warming is a myth. The global warming treaty is a disaster. There, I said it.” More recently, Pence has kind of acknowledged the fact-based nature of human action contributing to climate change but opposes ending any of the industrial, governmental, or corporate practices responsible. He has consistently advocated withdrawing from climate change agreements and treaties. Pence has an impressively atrocious record on environmental issues and a slavish devotion to big energy and big oil companies.

He opposed government assistance to U.S. workers who lost their jobs because of free trade agreements and has supported every neoliberal trade program since his time in public office. Pence was a loud proponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership until he joined Trump on the ticket, and now he claims to be pondering the “wisdom” of the agreement.

Mike Pence was raised Catholic, in a Kennedy Democrat household, but he has been a devout evangelical since being converted at a Christian music festival in Kentucky while in college. Pence now describes himself as “a Christian, a Conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” Even his political action committee’s name gives off a crusader vibe: Principles Exalt a Nation.

Pence opposed imposing restrictions on no-bid contracting, which may help explain his close relationship to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. In December 2007, three months after Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, Pence and his Republican Study Committee, which served “the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives,” organized a gathering to welcome Prince to Washington. But their relationship is not just forged in wars. Prince and his mother, Elsa, have been among the top funders of scores of anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives across the country and have played a key role in financing efforts to criminalize abortion.

Prince has long given money to Pence’s political campaigns, and toward the end of the presidential election, he contributed $100,000 to the pro-Trump/Pence Super PAC Make America Number 1. Prince’s mother kicked in another $50,000. Ironically, Erik Prince — who portrays himself as a mix between Indiana Jones, Rambo, Captain America, and Pope Benedict — is now working with the Chinese government through his latest “private security” firm.

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, participates in a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Oct. 2, 2007, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The Prince family’s support for Pence, and the Christian supremacist movement he represents, has deep roots.

Erik Prince’s father, Edgar, built up a very successful manufacturing business in Holland, Michigan, and became one of the premier bankrollers of what came to be known as the radical religious right. They gave Gary Bauer the seed money to start the Family Research Council and poured money into James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. “Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom builder,” Bauer recalled soon after the elder Prince’s death. “For him, personal success took a back seat to spreading the Gospel and fighting for the moral restoration of our society.” Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, whose father, Richard, founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway and went on to own the Orlando Magic basketball team. The two families merged together like the monarchies of old Europe and swiftly emerged as platinum-level contributors to far-right Christian causes and political figures.

The Prince and DeVos families gave the seed money for what came to be known as the Republican Revolution when Newt Gingrich became House speaker in 1994 on a far-right platform known as the Contract with America. The Prince and DeVos clans also invested heavily in a scheme developed by Dobson to engage in back-door lobbying activities by forming “prayer warrior” networks of people who would call politicians to advocate for Dobson’s religious and political agenda. Instead of lobbying, which the organization would have been prohibited from doing because of its tax and legal status, they would claim they were “praying” for particular policies.

The Princes consistently poured money into criminalizing abortion, privatizing education, blocking gay rights, and other right-wing causes centered around their interpretation of Christianity. The family, especially Erik, was very close to Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man,” Watergate conspirator Charles “Chuck” Colson. The author of Nixon’s enemies list, Colson was the first person sentenced in the Watergate scandal, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in the investigation of the dirty tricks campaign against Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Colson became a born-again Christian before going to prison, and after his release, he started the Prison Fellowship, which sought to convert prisoners to Christianity to counter what Colson saw as the Islamic menace in U.S. prisons. Erik Prince funded this as well and went on prison visits with Colson.

All of these figures, bankrolled by the Prince family, are the ideological and theological ascendants of Mike Pence, who called Colson “a dear friend and mentor.” Colson and his allies viewed the administration of Bill Clinton as a secular “regime” and openly contemplated a faith-based revolution. In the early ’90s, Colson teamed up with conservative evangelical minister-turned-Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus and others to build a unified movement. That work ultimately led in 1994 to the controversial document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” (Note: I wrote extensively about this in my book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” and drew heavily on that for this story.) Pence has described himself as “a born-again, evangelical Catholic.”

The ECT manifesto declared:

The century now drawing to a close has been the greatest century of missionary expansion in Christian history. We pray and we believe that this expansion has prepared the way for yet greater missionary endeavor in the first century of the Third Millennium. The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics.

The signatories called for a unification of these religions in a common missionary cause, that “all people will come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” They asserted that religion is “privileged and foundational in our legal order” and spelled out the need to defend “the moral truths of our constitutional order.” The document was most passionate in its opposition to abortion, calling abortion on demand “a massive attack on the dignity, rights, and needs of women. Abortion is the leading edge of an encroaching culture of death.” It also called for “moral education” in schools, advocating for educational institutions “that transmit to coming generations our cultural heritage, which is inseparable from the formative influence of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity.”

The ECT signers, according to author Damon Linker — who worked for Neuhaus for years — “had not only forged a historic theological and political alliance. They had also provided a vision of America’s religious and political future. It would be a religious future in which upholding theological orthodoxy and moral traditionalism overrode doctrinal disagreements. And it would be a political future in which the most orthodox and traditionalist Christians set the public tone and policy agenda for the nation.”

In November 1996 — the month Clinton crushed Bob Dole and won re-election — an organ of what Linker termed the theoconservative movement, Richard Neuhaus’s journal First Things, published a “symposium” titled “The End of Democracy?” Acknowledging that it might be viewed as “irresponsibly provocative and even alarmist,” the symposium bluntly questioned “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” A series of essays raised the prospect of a major confrontation between the church and the “regime,” at times seeming to predict a civil-war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government, exploring possibilities “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”

Chuck Colson authored one of the five major essays in the issue, as did the extremist judge Robert Bork, whom Reagan had tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Supreme Court in 1987. Colson’s essay was titled “Kingdoms in Conflict.” “Events in America may have reached the point where the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation of the judicially controlled regime,” Colson wrote, adding that a “showdown between church and state may be inevitable. This is not something for which Christians should hope. But it is something for which they need to prepare.”

Dobson said the essays “laid an indisputable case for the illegitimacy of the regime now passing itself off as a democracy,” adding, “I stand in a long tradition of Christians who believe that rulers may forfeit their divine mandate when they systematically contravene the divine moral law. … We may rapidly be approaching the sort of Rubicon that our spiritual forebears faced: Choose Caesar or God. I take no pleasure in this prospect; I pray against it. But it is worth noting that such times have historically been rejuvenating for the faith.”

Today, Pence and his allies have warded off the return of another secular Clinton regime that their ideological and theological prophets once contemplated overthrowing. They will now have the opportunity to build the temple they have long desired. “Secular viewers forget that King David wasn’t always such a nice guy in the Bible, but he was God’s chosen man,” said Jeff Sharlet. “So there’s a coalescing idea that somehow, obviously, God is doing something with Trump.”

Donald Trump’s grasp of the bible is certainly not up to the standards of Pence and the religious zealots behind him. “Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame,” Trump declared — in the same way he spits out “Make America Great Again” — in front of an audience at an evangelical college on the campaign trail. People laughed. At him. It is Second Corinthians.

Perhaps that episode is telling. The radical religious right doesn’t need to save Trump’s soul. As they saw in the campaign, Trump has staked out a hateful agenda — one that tracks quite well with the crusades of Pence and his fellow apostles. Even if elements of Trump’s vile rhetoric and his various threats were a psychotic form of performance art, or mere opportunistic political strategy, as some suggest, they have set the stage for the pursuit of a civilizational war that poses a dire threat to vulnerable populations throughout the world. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a slew of prominent Democrats have publicly said that Americans should give Trump a chance. With Mike Pence seated at the right hand of the father, running foreign and domestic policy, they will do so at their peril.

]]>Recent NewsWed, 16 Nov 2016 03:00:20 +000011-15-16 How the US justifies drone strikes: targeted killing, secrecy and the law http://warcriminalswatch.org/index.php/news/40-recent-news/2488-11-15-16-how-the-us-justifies-drone-strikes-targeted-killing-secrecy-and-the-law-
By Jameel Jaffer

For decades the US condemned targeted killings, characterizing them as assassinations – but it was unclear what distinguished America’s drone campaign from the killings it historically rejected as unlawful

The sun had yet to rise when missiles launched by CIA drones struck a clutch of buildings and vehicles in the lower Kurram tribal agency of Pakistan, killing four or five people and injuring another. It was February 22, 2016, and the American drone campaign had entered its second decade. Over the next weeks, officials in Washington and Rome announced that the US military would use the Sigonella air base in Sicily to launch strikes against targets in Libya. American strikes in Yemen killed four people driving on a road in the governorate of Shabwah and eight people in two small villages in the governorate of Abyan. A strike in Syria killed an Indian citizen believed to be a recruiter for the self-styled Islamic State, and another strike killed a suspected Islamic State fighter in northern Iraq. A particularly bloody series of drone strikes and airstrikes in Somalia incinerated some 150 suspected militants at what American officials described as a training camp for terrorists. In south-eastern Afghanistan, a series of drone strikes killed 12 men in a pickup truck, two men who attempted to retrieve the bodies, and another three men who approached the area when they became worried about the others.

Over just a short period in early 2016, in other words, the United States deployed remotely piloted aircraft to carry out deadly attacks in six countries across central and south Asia, north Africa, and the Middle East, and it announced that it had expanded its capacity to carry out attacks in a seventh. And yet with the possible exception of the strike in Somalia, which garnered news coverage because of the extraordinary death toll, the drone attacks did not seem to spark controversy or reflection. As the 2016 presidential primaries were getting under way, sporadic and sketchy reports of strikes in remote regions of the world provided a kind of background noise – a drone in a different sense of the word – to which Americans had become inured.

Senior officials in the administration of President Barack Obama variously described drone strikes as “precise,” “closely supervised,” “effective,” “indispensable,” and even the “only game in town” – but what they emphasized most of all is that the drone strikes they authorized were lawful.

In this context, though, “lawful” had a specialized meaning. Except at the highest level of abstraction, the law of the drone campaign had not been enacted by Congress or published in the US Code. No federal agency had issued regulations relating to drone strikes, and no federal court had adjudicated their legality. Obama administration officials insisted that drone strikes were lawful, but the “law” they invoked was their own. It was written by executive branch lawyers behind closed doors, withheld from the public and even from Congress, and shielded from judicial review.

Secret law is unsettling in any context, but it was especially so in this one. For decades the US government had condemned targeted killings, characterizing them as assassinations or extrajudicial executions. On its face, the drone campaign signified a dramatic departure from that position – a departure that demanded explanation, at the very least. It was far from obvious what distinguished American drone strikes from the targeted killings the United States had historically rejected as unlawful. Nor was it clear how these targeted killings could be reconciled with international human rights law, with a decades-old executive order that bans assassinations, with the constitutional guarantee of due process, or, for that matter, with domestic laws that criminalize murder.

The scale of the drone campaign, and the human cost of it, made government secrecy even more disquieting. The United States was carrying out lethal strikes not only on actual battlefields, but in places far removed from them as well. The first strike President Obama authorized killed at least nine people in the tribal areas of Pakistan. An early strike in Yemen, albeit one carried out with cruise missiles rather than drones, killed two families, including as many as 21 children – and, according to the New York Times, “left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents.” By the end of President Obama’s first term, American strikes had killed several thousand people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including many hundreds of civilian bystanders. The deaths of innocents raised sharp moral questions, and the moral questions gave urgency to the legal ones.

Early in 2010, American media organizations began to report that Anwar al-Awlaki, an American, had been added to “kill lists” maintained by the CIA and JSOC – the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command. Awlaki had once been a preacher at a mosque near Falls Church, Virginia. He had condemned the September 11 attacks, encouraged “interfaith dialogue,” and been invited to dine at the Pentagon. In the weeks after the attacks, however, the FBI became suspicious of Awlaki’s earlier contact with several of the hijackers. FBI agents interviewed Awlaki repeatedly and placed him under constant surveillance. In 2002, citing a “climate of fear [and] intimidation,” Awlaki left the United States for the United Kingdom. Two years later he returned to Yemen, where he had spent much of his childhood and where most of his family still lived.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Yemeni cleric and recruiter for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen in 2008. Photograph: AP

But Awlaki’s past followed him to Yemen. Soon after he arrived there, the United States pressured the Yemeni government to detain him. He was imprisoned without trial. By the time he was freed 18 months later – the FBI having been unable to provide the Yemeni government with evidence to justify his continued imprisonment – his views toward the United States had hardened. In online videos, and in an English-language magazine called Inspire, he became an unforgiving critic of US policies and, in some instances, an apologist for attacks against Americans. In 2009, a Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to detonate plastic explosives on a Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit; American intelligence officials came to suspect that he had been equipped by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based group, and that he had been instructed by Awlaki. By early 2010, American intelligence officials were describing Awlaki as the “Bin Laden of the internet” and “the most dangerous man in the world” – and they had marked him for death.

Intelligence officials’ claims about Awlaki were exceptionally grave ones, but the astonishing revelation that the government intended to carry out the deliberate and premeditated targeted killing of one of its own citizens – something the United States had not done since at least the civil war – brought the debate about the government’s drone campaign into American courtrooms. I traveled to Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, in the spring of 2010 with Ben Wizner, one of my colleagues at the American Civil Liberties Union, to meet with Nasser al-Awlaki, Anwar’s father. At the offices of a Yemeni human rights organization, Dr Awlaki, an American-trained economist who had gone on to become a minister in Yemen’s government and then the president of Yemen’s largest university, asked us, disbelievingly, whether the US constitution could possibly permit what the government was proposing to do. When Ben and I returned to New York, we worked with Pardiss Kebriaei and Maria LaHood at the Center for Constitutional Rights to develop a challenge to the lawfulness of the government’s kill lists.

It was a bizarre death penalty case in which there was no indictment, the accused was in hiding overseas, and the prosecutors, who had already pronounced the sentence, were apoplectic at the suggestion that there should be anything resembling a trial. In the fall of 2010, John Bates, a federal district court judge, presided over a hearing in which justice department lawyers argued that the constitution permits the government to kill suspected terrorists without judicial process, and we argued in response that if the constitution meant anything at all, it surely meant that the government could not kill its own citizens without ever justifying its actions to a court. In his subsequent ruling, Bates wrote that the case was “unique and extraordinary,” and he conceded that it raised profound questions about “the proper role of the courts in our constitutional structure,” but he nonetheless dismissed the case on procedural and jurisdictional grounds. Nine months later, with the court having declined to intervene, a drone strike in Yemen’s northern al-Jawf governorate killed Awlaki and three others, including Samir Khan, the 25-year-old American who published and edited Inspire.

Less expected – and more shocking – was the US government’s killing, two weeks later, of Anwar’s American-born son, Abdulrahman. A gangly, bookish 16-year-old, Abdulrahman had set out from his grandparents’ home in Sana’a determined to find his father. Not knowing where to look, he traveled by bus to the southern governorate of Shabwah, where his extended family lived. He learned there of the drone strike that had killed his father hundreds of miles to the north. While President Obama was at Fort Myer in Virginia describing the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki as “a tribute to our intelligence community,” 16-year-old Abdulrahman was in the remote province of Shabwah struggling to come to terms with his father’s death. One evening he and his cousins stopped by the side of the road at the kind of informal, open-air restaurant that is common in Yemen. A group of men already gathered there were roasting lamb over an open fire. Abdulrahman and his companions set out a blanket on the ground. They would probably have heard the buzz of drones overhead; perhaps they would have seen a flash of light. Hours later, when other family members arrived at the site, they found only a crater, scattered body parts, and the remnants of American missiles.

We filed another suit, this time on behalf of the estates of Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Judge Bates had rejected our earlier effort, but we hoped another judge might be more receptive to a case that sought after-the-fact judicial review of the government’s actions – especially because those actions had resulted in the death of a 16-year-old boy. Hina Shamsi, my colleague who argued the case, pressed the court to consider the implications of closing the courthouse door. But this second case was also dismissed, with the government contending again that the lawfulness of drone strikes was for the political branches to decide, and with Judge Rosemary M Collyer ultimately holding that legal remedies that would have been available in other contexts were not available in this one.

The litigation relating to the strikes that killed the three Americans in Yemen prompted a degree of public reflection about the drone campaign and forced the government to clarify and defend some of its positions. It also compelled courts to confront (if not answer) important legal questions relating to the government’s policies. But the debate generated by the litigation was a narrow one, focusing mainly on the scope of the US government’s authority to kill its own citizens, and even that debate was distorted by secrecy and selective disclosure. Government officials declared that Anwar al-Awlaki had been an “operational terrorist,” but they declined to disclose the evidence that supported this charge. They withheld memos in which the justice department concluded that the government could kill terrorism suspects without justifying its actions to a court. They intimated that the killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman had been inadvertent, but they declined to supply an on-the-record account of the strike that resulted in his death, and they withheld the results of their post-strike investigations. They controlled most of the information and disclosed only what they chose to.

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This book is possible because the secrecy surrounding American drone strikes has begun, at the margins, to erode. The documents collected here shed light on how a president committed to ending the abuses associated with the Bush administration’s “war on terror” came to dramatically expand one of the practices most identified with that war, and they supply a partial view of the legal and policy framework that underlies that practice. But while many of the documents collected here were meant to be defenses of the drone campaign, ultimately they complicate, at the very least, the government’s oft-repeated argument that the campaign is lawful. To be sure, even the existence of these documents is an indication of the extent to which the drone campaign is saturated with the language of law. Perhaps no administration before this one has tried so assiduously to justify its resort to the weapons of war. But the rules that purportedly limit the government’s actions are imprecise and elastic; they are cherry picked from different legal regimes; the government regards some of them to be discretionary rather than binding; and even the rules the government concedes to be binding cannot, in the government’s view, be enforced in any court. If this is law, it is law without limits – law without constraint.

There is something ironic, and even sad, in the fact that the expansion and normalization of the drone campaign was overseen by President Obama, a onetime professor of constitutional law who was elected after promising to end the lawless national security policies of the administration that preceded his. Perhaps it is also true, though, that only President Obama could have overseen it. When President George W Bush left office, he was unpopular and distrusted. The evidence he had cited to justify the invasion of Iraq had been exposed as a fiction. His administration’s torture policies were widely viewed as an embarrassment and an outrage. The supreme court had repeatedly rejected his policies relating to military detention and prosecution. It is doubtful that the courts or the public would have allowed him to expand the drone campaign.

But many Americans who were appalled when Bush ordered extrajudicial detention were untroubled when Obama ordered extrajudicial killing. If they appreciated the breadth of the power Obama had claimed, they assumed he would use the power wisely. Equally significant, some of the scholars and human rights lawyers who might otherwise have been expected to harshly criticize Obama’s targeted-killing policies were part of Obama’s administration and deeply involved in developing the policies.

Several months before the 2012 presidential election, when it appeared that Americans might not give President Obama a second term, administration officials began to worry privately that the powers they had claimed for themselves might soon be in the hands of another president. They began to consider ways of narrowing the powers they had asserted. By this point, though, the administration had already persuaded a federal judge that the courts had no role to play in determining whether (or when) an American citizen could be targeted by his own government. The administration was already on its way toward persuading another judge that the government should not have to present evidence even after a targeted killing had been carried out. The powers claimed by the Obama administration had become entrenched – so entrenched that they could not readily be surrendered. This was even more true in early 2016, when Obama administration officials turned once again to the question of what legacy they would leave to their successors.

Now the lethal bureaucracy whose growth Obama personally oversaw will be turned over to a new administration. The powers Obama claimed will be wielded by another president. Perhaps as significant is the jarring fact that the practice of targeted killing – assassination, as it would once have been called, without a second thought – no longer seems remarkable, and the fact that the United States now boasts a legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to sustain this practice. Eight years ago the targeted-killing campaign required a legal and bureaucratic infrastructure, but now that infrastructure will demand a targeted-killing campaign. The question the next president will ask is not whether the powers Obama claimed should be exploited, but where, and against whom.